


Clockwork

by salamoonder



Category: Doctor Who (2005), The City of Ember - Jeanne DuPrau
Genre: A literal alternate universe au, Angst with a Happy Ending, Crossover, Established Relationship, F/F, F/M, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Lovers To Enemies, M/M, Other, Time Skips, Unhealthy Relationships, Wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff basically, i think
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2020-09-19 14:50:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20327335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salamoonder/pseuds/salamoonder
Summary: The Doctor has tried, of course, to forget. Every few decades she thinks maybe she'll succeed; maybe she can leave everything that happened behind in the ruins of Gallifrey.Or perhaps she can bury it where it truly belongs, in that dead or dying city that they stumbled across that came to be so like them, so hauntingly, achingly familiar that the Doctor could've sworn she could hear their hearts beating along with the rattle of its rusted and worn out plumbing. So familiar that the name was only whispered and they were both thrown right back to that moment in the eternal dark, with nothing to cling to but violent hands.Maybe deep down, she's just mad at herself. Because, really, on a cosmic scale? This is a speck of dust. A teenage squabble, a slammed door, an angry message, a night spent crying into a pillow.She keeps trying to convince herself of that.And every time, just like clockwork, she fails.





	1. Prologue: Fiction and Fatalities

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Simply_Isnt_On](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Simply_Isnt_On/gifts).

The Doctor is falling.

There’s a moment when she thinks she might make it, a trick of the light, a glint of sun on hot metal, and the shift in perspective that throws everything into sharp relief, makes everything closer than it is. She reaches, too stunned and focused to even scream.

It’s not even close.

She drops, vaguely aware of the screams of her companions--no, her  _ family _ \--of the roar of the wind as it rushes past her, the convergence of sea and sky and sound swirling together in her vision. She can hear her name, not her true name, just the common one--the cry for help--echoing all around her.

She falls, and as she falls she can hear a different voice, this one inside her, ever familiar, ever disappointed.

_ Too little too late _ , it whispers.  _ Just like always. You could have fixed it, and yet you didn’t. It’s your fault. It is always your fault. _

She inhales, preparing to hit the water, eyes closed, trying to block it out.

_ What’s the use of knowing everything if you can’t save anyone? _

It’s so close now that she can smell the sea spray, feel her hearts kick into overdrive.

_ If you couldn’t save  _ me?

* * *

“Alright, Doctor?” Yaz asks. She’s practically giddy, turning circles around the control panel, running her hands over the switches and dials. The Doctor swats her hand away and pulls her goggles up, frowning.

“Perfectly fine, Yaz, if someone doesn’t send my TARDIS into another dimension. What’s gotten into you? You just burst in here like--like you’d graduated high school, or something. What’s an exciting human thing?”

“Parallel universes,” says Yaz, eyes bright.

The Doctor blinks. “Sorry, what?”

“Parallel universes! They do exist, don’t they?”

“Yes, of course, but--”

“So we can get to them?” Yaz is practically bouncing up and down.

“Well-- _ technically _ speaking, yes, but--”

“So we can get  _ into books? _ ”

The Doctor raises an eyebrow. “Now, wherever did you get that idea?”

“From you, of course. You can’t tell me that you make all these references to Harry Potter and Scooby Doo and all that and expect me to believe we wouldn’t notice? You talk about it like they were real people, real events! Last week you kept going on about how you’d met Sherlock Holmes!”

The Doctor purses her lips together. “Yaz,” she starts carefully, “You know I, erm, well. When a time lord as old as me starts rambling about--”

Yaz rolls her eyes. “I’m aware that you exaggerate everything, Doctor, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t  _ some _ truth to it. I  _ know  _ you’ve been to parallel universes.”

The Doctor sighs. “Yaz, you’re slightly too clever for your own good.”

Yaz beams.

“That  _ wasn’t  _ a compliment,” the Doctor clarifies, and returns to the control panel of the TARDIS. “Where’s the rest of the fam, anyway?”

“Probably asleep, or eating breakfast, or something. We had a late night.”

“You could say that,” the Doctor mutters, thinking back on their previous trip, which had been to a planet trapped in a centuries long blackout and had taken quite some time to sort out.

“What do you say, though, Doctor? Just a quick trip...you and me…”

It’s the hopefulness in those last three words that causes the Doctor to look up and catch Yaz’s eye, albeit briefly. It doesn’t matter, though. The damage had been done. The Doctor was often physically incapable of resisting the pleas of her companions.

“Alright,” she relents, and looks away so she won’t have to see the immediate excitement on Yaz’s face. It’s a little hard to ignore, though, when Yaz then promptly throws her arms around the Doctor’s neck. It dislodges a laugh somewhere deep in her throat. “You have to pay attention, though, parallel worlds are extremely complicated and highly unstable.”

“Right, of course,” says Yaz, releasing the Doctor somewhat reluctantly and leaning against one of the railings.

“Years ago, I became so entwined in a parallel universe that--well. I nearly broke down the barriers of both worlds.” She crosses to the readout display and begins entering variables. “Back when Gallifrey was still a functioning part of the cosmos, travelling to parallel universes was no big deal. Pop over after lunch and be back in time for tea, no multiverse ending disasters required.”

She glances over at Yaz. She’s listening, but in the way that someone might listen when you explain to them what needs to be picked up at the grocery store. Few of her companions, she realizes, would ever know the weight that settled in her heart when she talked about Gallifrey, or the events that had taken place at Canary Wharf, or the displacement of Earth. It all felt like such a lot to her, and she almost despised herself for thinking of it as “context” or “background” when it was carved into her the way that meaning was carved into a wheel of circular Gallifreyan.

“Doctor?” Yaz prompts quietly, and she shakes her head.

“Yes. Right. Gallifrey.” She clears her throat. “Well. The thing is, now that Gallifrey is not  _ gone _ but simply temporally locked…”

She adjusts a few of the dashboard settings, pulls out her screwdriver and tweaks one of the readouts, and then squints at the display--and smiles, just barely.

“I mean…there was that business with the collapsing carnivorous bubble universe a while back, and then there was the other one tied to the hauntings in 1974…but…”

She finishes her adjustments and backs away. “If we are exceedingly careful and responsible, we may be able to circumvent any ill effects.” She flashes Yaz a huge grin. “Where do you want to start?”

* * *

Sometimes, the Doctor scares Yaz.

Not in a violent way; not even when the heat of anger burning in her eyes makes Yaz certain that if anything were to stand in her way in that moment it would be utterly destroyed.

The Doctor scares Yaz in a Lovecraftian Color Out of Space, depths of the void, unknowable ages, cosmic horror kind of way. In a sometimes she turns around and the Doctor looks like her body is physically a million miles away kind of way. In a sometimes she looks sad in a way that makes Yaz want to abolish the word “sad” and come up with a better, more nuanced word that can fit all the sorrow and heartache she sees in the Doctor and not some measly three letter monosyllable.

She’s just experienced one of those “sometimes”; the Doctor had drifted off in the middle of a sentence and locked her gaze on the wall. Yaz had waited as long as possible to snap her out of it, because, well...she felt bad. As though she was robbing her of something.

Yaz knows very well what it’s like to lie in bed for hours trying to sort something out, to come to terms with a breakup, to calm down after nearly hitting a rabbit in the road. She can’t imagine what it’s like to have thousands of comparable memories and to just never  _ stop _ , to keep going and going like the Doctor does, like a wind up toy whose only function is to wind itself back up, stuttering over what would’ve been a halt only to continue faster than before.

But eventually it gets a bit awkward.

And Yaz is bored, and a little impatient, and she’s almost certain that this will be just as much fun for the Doctor as it is for her.

The Doctor snaps upright as though no time at all has passed, and her mouth is off again at a million words per minute, and Yaz tries, somewhat desperately, to follow. She is relieved when the Doctor stops her explanations long enough to ask her where she wants to go.

“Um,” she says, not quite expecting that they’d get this far. She’d honestly expected more begging would be in order. She picks up her backpack and dumps its contents out on the TARDIS floor and begins sifting through the considerable number of books.

“Ooh, how about--?” She picks up a Star Wars comic, well worn, somewhat faded. The Doctor frowns.

“Yaz, I know it’s a time machine, but it’s considerably harder for me to calculate the effects we might have on history in a universe that, in addition to being other than our own, happened so far away and so long ago that no words could possibly describe the time or--”

“Alright, alright…” Yaz keeps sifting. “The Borrowers?”

The Doctor wrinkles her nose. “That’s  _ this _ universe, Yaz, humankind is just inordinately non observational. There’s probably borrowers in your backyard.”

Yaz blinks a few times, absorbing this information. “O...okay…could we do, uhh...” A copy of The Hobbit bumps against her hand and she looks up at the Doctor hopefully.

She sighs. “Well, I suppose.”

An hour later they’re tumbling through the doors of the TARDIS, covered in blood (luckily, most of it is green and blue), and thoroughly exhausted.

“Go go go  _ now! _ ” the Doctor yells as Yaz makes a dive for the controls and flips the one switch she knows will do...well... _ something _ . The TARDIS lurches violently as the Doctor slams and locks the doors, there’s a tremendous shudder...and then they both lay there on the floor, panting and aching.

“Yaz?” says the Doctor weakly.

“Yeah?”

“Let’s...not mention this to the boys.”

“Fine by me.”

It takes them a couple hours to get cleaned up and bandaged, and then the Doctor takes Yaz to a quiet but expensive restaurant in early 23rd century Paris. Yaz doesn’t know any French and the service is a little slow, but it’s a nice, safe trip, and neither one of them brings up their previous spider infested misadventure.

It’s another week before Yaz brings up parallel universes again.


	2. By Any Other Name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose questions classic literature and the Doctor takes her to an unfamiliar planet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've thought a lot about whether or not I should continue this. In the end I decided the story needs to be told. Maybe it'll be hated, I don't know. But I need to get it out of my head.

“Whatcha up to?” the Doctor asks, nosing at Rose’s shoulder like a neglected puppy. She laughs, reaches up to tousle his hair.

“What’s it look like, stupid, I’m reading.”

He scoffs, entirely unoffended. “When you could be off at the end of the universe with me?”

“Even so.”

A few more seconds pass, and he circles around the park bench to check the book’s title. “I knew her, you know. Lovely woman.”

Rose rolls her eyes. “Is this a ploy to get me to ask if I can meet Jane Austen? Because if so--”

He grins, sprawls across her lap, and reaches up to pluck the book gently from her hands. “Is it working?”

“Idiot,” Rose murmurs lovingly, and leans forward to kiss the tip of his nose. He beams as she pulls away, tucks a bookmark from his coat pocket into her page, and brushes a strand of hair out of her face.

“Are you paying attention to me yet?” he asks.

“God, Doctor, you’re like a cat. Needy as all hell. Yes, I’m paying attention.”

“ _ Good, _ because boy do I have plans--” he springs up, tugging her into a standing position, and pulls her back to the TARDIS.

“I’m sure you do,” says Rose. “Hey, Doctor?”

“Mm?” he’s throwing his coat on the coat rack, running fond hands over the pillars of the TARDIS.

“Could--could we actually--go there?” She’s waving the book, somewhat tentative.

“Well, of course we could. Didn’t I just tell you I knew Jane Austen? Were you paying any attention at all, or were you just lost in my eyes?”

Rose chooses to ignore this last. “No, no--could we go  _ there _ . Pride and Prejudice, I mean. There must be some sort of world where it really happened, you’re always going on about Agatha Christie’s stuff.”

“Ah.” the smile melts a little from his face. “Well, I suppose we could, but it would be massively complicated.”

“Would it?” asks Rose, taking a step forward.

“There is a difference between fiction and reality, Rose. Most authors...well, most authors steal. They take bits and pieces like crows picking up coins and jewelry and trash, and most of the time, no one misses them. And there’s such a huge suspension of disbelief with you lot--anything too fantastical and you write it off as a hallucination, or a dream, or indigestion. There’s few people who really hold onto those things.”

He’s got that lost look again, the look that means he’s remembering something that happened millennia before Rose was born.

It makes her feel small. So...she takes his hand. He comes back to her, and she watches as his whole expression recolors and takes her in.

“D’you think I’d be one of the ones?” she asks. “To hold onto the fantastical, I mean?”

He grins, and takes her other hand. “Well, as a rule I don’t like to brag, but I’d say I’m pretty fantastical, and you seem to have no trouble holding onto me.”

Rose does not meet Jane Austen that day. She does not meet Mr. Darcy or the Bennets that day, either.

Instead, she and the Doctor spend quite a lot of time holding onto each other, and the TARDIS hums, sedentary and pleased, in the middle of a park in London. When the Doctor wakes up the next morning and rolls over to see Rose, half awake and clinging to his arm, he thinks his hearts might actually burst. She’s so fragile, and so strong, and so small and so clever...and...all too temporary.

“Rose,” he whispers, and she rouses enough to adjust her grip and cling even tighter to him.

“Rose,” he says, a bit louder. “Wake up. I want to take you to Kamino.”

She perks up immediately at that. “What’s Kamino?”

“It’s a planet,” he tells her, flipping her over onto her back and poking her in the stomach. She squeals and attempts to tickle him, and he has to dodge her hands as he continues his explanation. “The whole thing is water, all the way through, from the crust to the core, and-- _ mmph _ \--Rose, I-- _ Rose _ \--how am I ever going to finish telling you if you won’t stop kissing me?”

“Sorry, Doctor,” she says, but her eyes are sparkling. He slumps forward onto her chest and reaches up to play with her hair as he continues.

“It’s entirely water, and the three sapient species live on floating islands or floating cities of huge air bubbles trapped in masses of--well, I suppose you would call it seaweed. Very tricky to navigate. Lovely spot for summer holiday.”

Rose hums contentedly as he continues to pet her hair. “Aren’t they scared the bubbles will rise to the surface and pop?”

“Well, aren’t you scared the san andreas fault will finally obliterate California? That London will be wiped out by rising sea levels? That the world will be hit with an asteroid? People adapt, Rose. We all live in danger.”

Rose considers this. “I think I’m in danger of starvation by pancake deprivation.”

Now the Doctor rolls his eyes. “We weren’t very good at it last time, you know. Maybe we should just go out for breakfast?”

She shakes her head, determined. “That’s why we practice. Come on, time dork.”

Despite their disastrous previous attempts at making pancakes, the TARDIS still seems to have pancake ingredients on board, which seems to indicate that even she doesn’t think they’re irredeemably bad cooks. There’s even a few extras: chocolate chips, fresh berries, powdered sugar. In the end the pancakes come out mysteriously thin and flat, but the Doctor declares them accidental crepes, and since nothing burns and there’s a minimum of batter on either of their faces, the cooking experiment is generally considered a success.

They eat while the TARDIS flies. Rose is still thinking about Pride and Prejudice, but says nothing. The Doctor is thinking of something else entirely.

“Doctor,” she asks suddenly, stirring him from his memories.

“Hm? Yes?”

“I know you said that whole thing about fiction and reality, but--well, couldn’t it be real in another world? Infinite universes, infinite possibilities and all that?”

The Doctor thinks. “The multiverse is a bit more complicated than that, Rose. The general, human theory is that yes, every time someone makes a choice it…well, it splits reality, and another universe is born. There are several problems with that.”

He clears his throat, takes out his glasses, and ignores Rose when she rolls her eyes. “Firstly, what constitutes a choice? Is taking a step with your right foot instead of your left a choice? Or blinking three times over the course of ten seconds instead of two? Who gets to have choices, do you have to be sapient? Or just alive enough to move? Do viruses have choices? Reality is not an onion, Rose. It doesn’t...grow exponential layers. Things don’t just happen.” He frowns, checks himself. “Well sometimes things do just happen. But reality does follow a set of rules. And probably no one’s got even one of them worked out right, and it keeps making new rules and destroying old ones, and--”

“Doctor?” Rose interrupts.

“Mm?”

“I think I get it. Or. Well. I understand how much I don’t get it. How much everyone doesn’t get it.”

He takes a deep breath and removes his glasses. “Right. Okay. That’s alright then.” He fiddles with the lenses for a second before finally taking a handkerchief out of his pocket and beginning to clean them. “It takes a lot of energy and time and...and emotion to hold a universe together. I’ve no idea how many there are but they’re all extremely unique.” He sighs through his nose, slips both glasses and handkerchief back into his pocket, and begins plotting a course. “Hold that lever down, will you?”

Rose moves to do so. “Doctor...are you alright?”

His head comes up immediately. “Course I am, why wouldn’t I be?”

“No reason, just…” she shakes her head. “You seem distracted, is all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be. As long as you’re alright…?”

He fidgets. Rose keeps her gaze fixed on him, but he’s roving over the controls again, adjusting things that she knows well enough by now don’t need to be adjusted.

“I’m fine,” he says slowly, and this time she can see the like. “Bit of a headache, is all.”

“Do you need anything?”

A head shake. She purses her lips, thinks.

He gets like this sometimes, and it means there are quiet moments in the TARDIS. Rose struggled with it at first--when the most talkative person you know, someone who literally loves the sound of their own voice, suddenly slips into one word answers or indicative gestures, it’s almost impossible to believe that nothing’s wrong. And she’s sure that the Time War still haunts him (less so these days, but still) and she can never hope to understand it fully, but sometimes, the Doctor is just quiet.

She tries to let him be.

Usually it’s during a journey, and then the hum of the TARDIS engine and soft clicks and snaps and beeps of the control panel seem to fill the space normally occupied by his voice. It almost seems to have a voice of its own now, the TARDIS. Ever since Station Ten, it’s become much clearer to her why the Doctor talks to the old machine the way he does. She doesn’t remember being the Bad Wolf, but there are traces of it that have stayed with her. Talking to the TARDIS was like talking to a pet, seriously, the way you might talk to another person. Sometimes even more intimately than you might talk to another person. Other people might roll their eyes at you; it didn’t make a difference. It wasn’t simply hoping or wishing for understanding, either. You told the TARDIS you were having a rough day and the air around you warmed, steam hissed softly somewhere in its great, echoing confines, and the whole ship settled sympathetically around you like a sentient blanket.

Rose understood it to be an extension of the Doctor himself as well, now. Where the Doctor forgot to reach out his left hand, it quietly flipped a lever. Where he set down his right, it subtly cooled the burning metal of a pipe. The whole thing operated like a hugely complex mechanical limb, picking up where he left off.

This was not to say that the TARDIS didn’t occasionally get snippy--with both of them. It was just like any other person and sometimes it literally growled at Rose if it thought she was stepping out of line, and it was not above getting sarcastic with the Doctor if he was being careless with repairs. This sometimes came in the form of hiding any room they needed to get to, passive aggressively manifesting instruction manuals, or giving off cold, clammy fog from who knows where. That happened much less these days, though, as Rose felt she had a better grasp on what the TARDIS did and didn’t like, and it and the Doctor rarely got into any kind of serious fight.

Sometimes Rose would feel an odd twinge of disembodied jealousy mixed with wistfulness, and she was sure the feeling didn’t belong to her.

At any rate, the TARDIS helped to fill the quieter moments in their travels and was currently purring reassuringly under Rose’s grip. She wasn’t entirely sure if the reassurance was for her or the Doctor but contented herself in knowing that at least she couldn’t feel any major worry or concern. It was a safe bet that, whatever the TARDIS was picking up on, it was nothing she needed to freak out over.

Kamino is an endlessly eye catching, glimmering ball of light. The Doctor takes them in slow so they can both enjoy the view and opens the TARDIS doors so they don’t have to crowd around the display screen.

“God, it doesn’t even look real,” Rose says in a hushed whisper.

The Doctor grins at her. “I know. Looks like a painting.”

It reminds Rose of a video she’d seen once of a soap bubble freezing in the snow, shifting and crystallizing in the light of the nearest sun. The surface is almost too bright to look at, shimmering with rainbows and waves so huge she can see the entire surface of the planet ripple beneath its cloak of clouds. They don’t speak after that exchange; they just watch as the planet’s surface swallows up the view outside the TARDIS and pretend that they’re not stealing glances at each other. When they get close enough to see pods of dolphin-like animals that Rose can’t totally identify swimming along the surface, the Doctor takes the controls back and directs them carefully inside the planet. Rose feels her whole body shudder as she realizes they’ve landed hundreds of miles below the surface somewhere in the planet’s watery depths, in, according to the Doctor, one of the underwater cities of the dominant native species.

He gestures at the door and bows to her. “After you, m’dear.”


End file.
